Hello,
I am new to R/C universe. I came across this section of the forum and thought maybe I would share a picture of me homebuilt helicopter I have been building for the past several years. It is called a A/W 95. I am almost done with it now. I should start testing it in a few weeks. It is a simple design (if there is such a thing as a simple helicopter). It is powered by a 2 cycle Rotax snowmobile engine.

I have been working on it for about 5 years off and on. There was alittle over a year where I couldn't work on it due to money being tight. I am now working on it again and I am hoping to have it ready within a month.

No, I do not yet have a heli rating. My friend built on also. His is done. He don't have any experience either. I have some "funny" video of him also. I am sure it will be about the scariest thing I have ever tried but I have ALWAYS wanted to do it. I have rode in quite a few helicopters but never piloted one on my own.

Don't mess with it too much till you get training. I have a friend who bought an ultralite and took it out to just "taxi" it. He spent the next 10 hours in surgery getting rebuilt because he managed to lift it off and didn't know what to do with it. Wached another guy in a benson gyrocopter fly it who we thought knew what he was doing. He died when it hit the ground!

yeah if i were you i definitely would not mess with it yet until you get some training in. i saw a video of this guy that just bought a small 2 seater, took it out for a spin and didnt have a single bit of training, thought he was a macho man and knew what he was doing. lifted off, and in the next 4 seconds the helicopter was in pieces. i fly them on flight simulator 2004 and it was very hard to learn to fly one. landings are the hardest part! i would love to take helicopter lessons but the price is ridiculously high...working on my private liscense (flying cessnas) right now, so ill just stick with that

I bought a partially built Benson gyrocopter in the early seventies. I finished buliding it and was waiting on an engine rebuild to complete the project. I didn't have any real flying experience and was told by an experienced gyro pilot that it was a piece of cake. I could picture myself flying to my friends houses/farms and impressing the young ladies with my way cool Benson. Well, my dad found out about the project (he was a Navy fighter pilot and was an accident investigator for the military) and he begged me to sell it. If I did, he would send me through flight school. I finally agreed to sell it and in hindsight it was a very smart move. I got my private ticket and realize that without proper training I probably would have busted my arse in that Gyro. Please get proper instruction in full scale helis before attempting flight in the homebuilt. By the way, the experienced gyro pilot I was referring to is not with us anymore. He crashed test flying someones newly built gyrocopter. I'm sure that little heli homebuilt would be a blast to fly, if built to perfection and the pilot had sufficient heli training. Good luck

Do yourself a big favor and get your license in a Robinson R22. The R22 is very sensitive to control inputs,turbulence, and wind, just like your ship will be. It also bleeds rotor energy very fast when mismanaged, a trait many homebuilt helicopters share. An industry adage is; "If you can fly a R22, you can fly anything."

Thanks DT56. I've heard that before about the R22. I am hoping to start lessons soon. They are so expensive.[] I've had a few rides and some unofficial tips in a bell 47, but not near enough info to try my own yet.
Thanks again.
-Tony

Do yourself a big favor and get your license in a Robinson R22. The R22 is very sensitive to control inputs,turbulence, and wind, just like your ship will be. It also bleeds rotor energy very fast when mismanaged, a trait many homebuilt helicopters share. An industry adage is; "If you can fly a R22, you can fly anything."

Yep. Squirrely little beast when you 1st start out, but once you tame the little bugger, they fly pretty nice.. The requirements to get rated in one are higher than in say a Schweizer 300 because of the low inertia rotor system but it's not bad. (SFAR 73 in the latest FAR/AIM will have all the details.)

Let me know how it goes. I could fly it I think. I am not a fan of the R-22 though. I agree with one thing though, if you can survive in an R-22 you should be able to survive anything. R-22 is a death trap. I'd rather fly the homebuilt. Do get someone to give you some training in a real chopper first though. You'd be surprised at just how fast your feet and arms can get tied up even in a good flying helicopter. Not to mention what a quartering tailwind will do to you. Hmmm, now that I think about it that think will be even harder than turbine power that I am used to. You will have to govern rotor rpm by hand with the throttle. I may not be able to fly it. Get some time in a bell 47 or a hiller dude. Your life will depend on it.

Heliguy:
I'm glad to read that you are going to get flight instruction before trying to fly your machine. Take it from a 28-year helicopter pilot veteran, don't try and fly your machine until you can demonstrate your ability to do two things, hover safely and perform autorotations, both hovering and from cruise flight. Also knowing how to recover from loss of tailrotor control would be nice. Just to give you some idea of how unnatural flying a chopper is, I took my Navy Jet pilot brother up in a Huey one day to let him try his hand at hovering. He had been going off about how hard it is to land a jet on a carrier. It took exactly 4 seconds to humble him! I had to take the controls to prevent a crash after 4 seconds! He got madder and madder as he fought to control the Huey. It isn't easy, but takes an instructor pilot to allow you to get the feel of hovering without crashing. Plan on at least 10 hours of dual instruction just to become proficient in hovering. The smaller the helicopter, the squirrlier it is. I've been rated in 13 different types of helicopters, from Bell G-47s, (the most fun) to the 50,000 pound Chinook CH-47D. The bigger, the easier to physically fly. Good luck to you. Once mastered, you'll have this skill for life.

Just have to put my 2 cents in, I am a Rotorcraft Certified flight instructor and also CFII. Having flown and learned in an R22 and have an R44 sign off and a few hours in a Bell 206 and am now teaching new students, currently, I got chills up my spine when I read what you are doing. Not only is it hard to fly a machine that has been built by aero engineers and tested and proven by highly proficient test pilots, you are not only making your own machine but you also seem to intend on flying it without any or minimal training. Not to shoot down what you are doing but I would not even fly your machine. I have seen numerous videos and heard numerous stories at the Robinson Factory In Torrance California when we go thru their training of TEST PILOTS killing themselves testing a helicopter that are built by certified helicopter engineers. Helicopters are one of thee most complicated flying machines ever invented and its not the obvious that will kill you, its the not so obvious and sometimes unexplainable. There many many of factors in flying a helicopter that YOU MUST KNOW. Mast bumbing, dynamic rollover, and Autorotations from a hover and at altitude to name a few. We have chats among pilots about people purchasing rotorway helicopters which are built in stages and approved by an FAA inspector throughout the build and people still whack themselves. I personaly witnessed a man kill hemself in a gyrocopter when I was very young after other people told him repeatedly not to fly his home built gyro. My opinion is that you be very very careful because I forsee this going very very badly and I dont mean just a crash, I see a possible fatality. Students fly hours and hours of straight and level before they can hover within a 10 foot circle. Hovering is thee hardest part of flying a helicopter. I in no way mean to deter you from flying, it is the most amazing thing you can do, it is expensive but the reason it is expensive is because of the technology and complexity of the training and of the maintenance of the machine you train in. The cost of training should tell you how complex it is what you are trying to do. Please take my advise, not only to train but to NOT FLY in your helicopter until it is inspected and deemed airworthy by an authourized FAA inspector, it will save your life.

The aircraft looks interesting. As others mentioned, I would at the very least talk with a local rotary instructor and be honest with your intentions. Have him look at the aircraft and then go from there. I'll bet you could learn in a big open field, probably don't have oge power. If I lived close, I would love to give it a try or at least get a feel for how it would react.

Hello everyone,
Thanks for the interest and concerns and comments. I have had it checked out by several people including a helicopter designer. I am taking some helicopter training now. I have been doing some testing on it. I have it tethered to the ground with 6 inches of straps to learn to hover and to just check everything out.
I am fighting a vibration in the rotor head right now. I found the problem, I just got to fix it.
Thanks again to everyone.

heliguy,
Congrats on making the right decision. It's much cheaper to pay for lessons than hospital bills, etc... Anyway, I was reading about your straps you use. I would be very careful of that due to a couple of important factors: Dynamic rollover and ground resonance. In your case, I would be more concerned about the dynamic rollover. The characteristics of dynamic rollover vary greatly with aircraft, momentum, and the variable critical angle. Be safe. I would almost think that you would be safer to just hover without any straps because you will need probably need a 2-4 foot hover to safely do so. I wonder if any tubing placed on the gear, like on RC heli's would help in your situation. I don't think the straps are doing anything for you and they may even contribute to that vibration that you mention.

Steve,
Thanks again for your input. I hear of dynamic rollover quite a bit. It must be easy to do. That would pretty much be the end for me. If I survived It would junk the helicopter. I didn't know the straps could cause this. The straps are short and are at all 4 corners of the helicopter. It don't think it can really can't get high enough to turn over. But hey I am new at this stuff what do I know? Now that you mentioned it I think the tubing on the gear is a great idea. I could maybe hook on 10 -12 foot long 2x4's to make it lot wider. Is that kind of what you were thinking? To make the base of the skids bigger. I did fly r/c helicopter and I put a hula hoop on it's skids. Worked great.
-Tony

Tony,
As long as the straps stay in place, it would be impossible to turn over. The issue then becomes when would the straps fail and if they did fail it would be almost immediate rollover as you are learning and will constantly be putting tension on the straps from diferent angles as you "stir the pot" with the cyclic. As far as extending the base as I mentioned, it sounds good now but real application is a whole different story. All it does is make tipping over much more difficult. This is a difficult issue because all of us who learned to fly real helicopters did so with an instructor sitting next to us. Kinda hard to learn when you don't know what you are doing wrong. This is where the instruction will pay for itself and even give you a bit of confidence, just enough to be dangerous.

Also, you mention that you can't get high enough to turn over. This is where the concept of dynamic rollover comes into play. That variable critical angle is dependent on many factors that you could possible only need as small as a 3 degree angle on the skids to induce the rollover. Please don't be fooled that your aircraft is so stable. Keep in mind that the helicopter just wants to spin around all over and you have to control it. Without you, it doesn't fly. I had lots of styrofoam gliders as a kid that I would throw around and watch fly, never had a helicopter that I would throw and watch fly.

Hovering, as mentioned, is the most difficult task to learn. We started by the instructor first giving me the pedals to maintain a constant heading. A few minutes later, he gives me the collective to see trees get smaller when I pull up and trees get bigger when I push down. Last, he gives me cyclic and we're all over the place as I'm dancing in my seat sweating my arse off. A few days later and it's not too bad. Hovering is an afterthought even though I no longer control it in my present aircraft.